The House F literary tablets are strikingly representative of the Sumerian literary corpus as a whole. That is partly because they have deeply influenced our notions of what that representative corpus is; and partly because they originate from Nibru, where nineteenth-century American digs had already uncovered the vast bulk of known Sumerian literature. (Frustratingly, this was in the days before stratigraphic excavation and systematic recording, so that we have no idea where exactly within Nibru those tablets come from; but their overall character is so like the finds from House F that the archaeologists must in fact have discovered three or four similar such schools, where the other sources for Axe were probably written.) Nibru was also at the intellectual heart of Sumer, as the home of Enlil, father of the gods, and geographically close to its core. Ifwe compare House F with a contemporaneous house in a more provincial town, we can see that Sumerian literature was rather more diverse than the homogeneous picture we get through the preponderance of sources from Nibru.
Me-Turan was just such a small town in the back of beyond, far up the Diyala river to the north-east of flat Sumer, in the foothills of the Zagros mountains. It was excavated by an Iraqi team in the early 1980s prior to the area being flooded for a dam. One house in particular, abandoned at least twenty years before the House F school, no later than 1760 BCE, has become known as the ‘scholar’s house’. It was about twice the size of House F, and had eight living spaces (rooms or courtyards). The excavators found nearly forty tablets in the front courtyard or in doorways leading off it and a similar number in a back room, the furthest away from the public areas in the front of the house. A dozen or so tablets were scattered through the other rooms too. Significantly, the character of the tablets was different in each space.
The scattered tablets were all household documents and elementary school exercises. The private back room (a storeroom?) held more household records and school work but also magical incantations in Sumerian, a collection of mathematical problems in Akkadian, and two bilingual hemero-logies, or calendars of omens. The public front courtyard, on the other hand, had no household records and just two school exercises. The other tablets there were all works of Sumerian literature, magical incantations and liturgical works in Sumerian. The Sumerian works were mostly preserved in two copies and included some well-known compositions such as Gilgames, Enkidu, and the Underworld (Group A), Gilgames andHuwawa, and Inana and Ebih (both Group J). But four of the compositions were previously unknown, or known only in fragments: they do not seem to have been mainstream literary works, in Nibru at least. Even the previously well-known works were often significantly different versions from those known from further south. And the fact that they were found with incantations and liturgical laments, also in multiple copies (and of which there was no sign in House F), raises questions about where the boundaries of Sumerian ‘literature’ really lie. Both incantations and liturgy (often in the difficult Emesal register of Sumerian, which is phonologically and lexically defined) are arguably professional ‘literatures’ associated with particular classes of priesthood—but so, perhaps, are some of the Sumerian hymns. It has been suggested that the owner of these tablets was an incantation priest or exorcist, Akkadian wasipum, whose choices of Sumerian literature were closely tied to his professional interests. On the other hand, many of the literary works in the scholar’s house are obviously curricular (or would be described as such if found in Nibru). One tablet in particular contains all four of the elementary Sumerian literary works now known as the Tetrad (see A hymn to Nisaba, Group I), and as we have seen there were other school tablets in the house too. Many questions remain to be answered about this ‘scholar’s house’ and what it can tell us about the diversity of content, meaning, and function of Sumerian literature in ancient Iraq.
World History
